Trump allegedly made a “criminal effort” to rig the 2020 election, according to the special counsel report

U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, released Tuesday, said that Donald Trump made a “unprecedented criminal effort” to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, but the president-elect’s triumph in November prevented Smith from taking the case to trial.

The story describes Smith’s decision to prosecute Trump on four counts, alleging that he conspired to thwart the certification and gathering of ballots after Democratic President Joe Biden defeated him in 2020.

It comes to the conclusion that although there was sufficient evidence to condemn Trump at trial, his impending reelection on January 20th prevented that from happening.

Smith, who has been under constant Trump attack, also defended his probe and the prosecutors who conducted it.

“It is, in a word, laughable that Mr. Trump claimed that the Biden administration or other political actors influenced or directed my decisions as a prosecutor,” Smith said in a letter outlining his report.

In an article on his Truth Social website following the revelation, Trump referred to Smith as a “lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the election.”

The Justice Department sent a letter from Trump’s attorneys to Attorney General Merrick Garland in which they referred to the study as a “politically motivated attack” and claimed that its publication before Trump’s return to the White House would disrupt the presidential transition.

The study cites a large number of previously published pieces of evidence.

The Insurrection Act, a U.S. legislation, was one of the additional facts that prosecutors explored using to charge Trump with instigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In the end, prosecutors determined that such a prosecution had legal dangers and that there was not enough proof that Trump intended for the “full scope” of violence to occur during the incident, which was an unsuccessful attempt by a group of his supporters to prevent Congress from recognizing the 2020 election.

Trump was accused in the indictment of plotting to deprive American citizens of their right to vote, hinder election certification, and cheat the country of accurate election results.

The report stated that prosecutors did not come to any definitive findings, but Smith’s office concluded that charges may have been appropriate against some co-conspirators who were alleged to have assisted Trump in carrying out the plot.

A number of Trump’s former attorneys were already named as co-conspirators in the indictment.

According to Smith’s argument, which is included in a second portion of the study, Trump unlawfully kept critical national security materials after leaving the White House in 2021.

The Justice Department has promised not to release such information to the public while the case against two Trump aides is still pending.

Smith, who departed the Justice Department this week, used a long-standing Justice Department policy prohibiting prosecution of a sitting president to withdraw both charges against Trump following his election victory last year. Both did not make it to trial.

Trump entered not guilty pleas to all of the accusations. As he often attacked Smith as “deranged,” Trump portrayed the lawsuits as attempts to harm his campaign and political movement for political reasons.

In the days leading up to his January 20 return to office, Trump and his two former co-defendants in the lawsuit involving the confidential materials attempted to prevent the report’s publication. Their requests to stop its publishing completely were rejected by the courts.

Plans to permit some senior members of Congress to privately see the report’s documents portion have been temporarily put on hold by the Justice Department, per an order from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who oversaw the papers case.

The prosecution presented a thorough analysis of their case against Trump in earlier court documents. A 700-page report on Trump’s post-2020 measures was released by a legislative commission in 2022.

Both investigations came to the conclusion that Trump sought to use fictitious groups of electors who had vowed to vote for Trump in states that Biden had actually won in order to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory. Trump also disseminated false claims of widespread voter fraud after the 2020 election and pushed state lawmakers not to certify the vote.

The endeavor reached its climax on January 6, 2021, when a group of Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent legislators from certifying the vote.

Legal issues with Smith’s lawsuit existed even before to Trump’s election victory. For months, it was put on hold as Trump defended his inability to face charges for official acts while in office.

He was primarily supported by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court, which granted previous presidents substantial immunity from criminal prosecution.